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With the death of David Bowie yesterday the world of music and art and fashion lost a cultural icon. As well as remembering his incredible music and ground-breaking visual and social statements, the great man is immortalised in the name of a huntsman spider: Heteropoda davidbowie.

I’ve not seen the original paper that named it, but it was presumably because the bright orange hair that covers the spider’s body reminded the author of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust period in the early 70s, and the name of Ziggy’s band – The Spiders From Mars.

That other recently deceased rock icon, Lemmy Kilmister, also has a species named for him – an extinct polychaete worm called Kalloprion kilmisteri – apparently named “in honor of Lemmy of Motörhead, for musical inspiration during the course of [studying the fossil]”.

Almost 12 months ago I wrote a post entitled “Building a blog readership takes time” and summarised how the audience for my own blog had increased slowly at first and then seemed to rapidly take off after about 18 months. The post received a lot of interest and more comments/pingbacks than usual, including a comparison with the first year of posting by the Ülo Niinemets’ Lab blog. So I thought I’d update the figure to look at what has happened in the intervening 11 months; here it is:

As you can see the upward course of monthly views has continued, increasing from 1000-2000 on average in autumn/winter 2014 to 3000-4000 on average at the moment. However the variance has also increased and over this time scale has become less predictable; for example, views for December 2015 were actually lower than for the same month in the previous year. The >7000 views for August 2015 is clearly an outlier, an anomaly caused by a deliberately provocative post entitled “Who is feeding the honey bee bullshit machine?” It will be interesting to see if this variability continues and I’ll report back in another year (!)

Academics seem to be obsessed with metrics of all kinds at the moment, and I’m certainly not immune to it as my recent post on the h-indexdemonstrated. So I was intrigued by a new (at least to me) browser plug-in that gives you instant altmetricssuch as number of times mentioned on Twitter, Facebook or on news outlets, or cited in blogs, policy documents, Wikipedia, etc. It’s called the Altmetrics Bookmarklet and can be downloaded (or rather dragged from the screen to the bookmark bar of your browser) from here.

I’ve given it a spin and it seems to do what it says it can do, within narrow publisher and time limits (2011 onward for Twitter, for instance). It’s very, very simple. Just find a paper that you are interested in, on the publisher’s official website; here’s a recent one by my colleagues Duncan McCollin and Robin Crockett – click on the Altmetric Bookmarklet (circled):

That gives you a drop-down of the current summary altmetrics for the paper which tells us it’s been tweeted by 14 people and mentioned on one Facebook page:

(As an experiment I’m going to see if it picks up this blog post once it’s live and will update below*).

If you select “Click for more details” you go to a new page that gives you…. more details:

And by selecting the different tabs you can see, for instance, exactly who has tweeted the paper:

It also gives you an altmetrics score for the paper (in this case 10) but it’s unclear to me how that’s calculated. Does anyone know?

That’s all there is to it. Is it possible to waste a lot of time playing around with this? Yes. Will it prove to be useful? Only time will tell. But it’s an interesting way of tracking the reach (and potential future impact) of your publications.

*UPDATE: The Altmetric Bookmarklet had picked up the mention of the paper on this blog in less than 24 hours.

Weather around the globe could get very unpredictable later this year if the forecasted “substantial El Nino event” occurs. Worth keeping an eye on this, some areas could experience extreme weather and the resulting impacts on habitats.

For his championing of the cause of pollinator conservation, my friend and colleague Professor Dave Goulson has been named one of the Top 50 “conservation heroes” by the BBC Wildlife Magazine, alongside luminaries such as Sir David Attenborough. Well done Dave, very well deserved!

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Very briefly, I’m hearing exciting reports over the web that a small population of the dodo has been discovered living alive and well in Mauritius, hundreds of years after it was thought to have gone extinct! Here’s the source. More information will be posted as and when I get it.

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Despite the clunkiness of some of the special effects, Jaws is a great movie that influenced a whole generation of organismal biologists into becoming marine ecologists, or at least terrestrial ecologists with a toe in the water. The movie contains some iconic characters and wonderful lines. One of my favourite scenes*is the exchange between Hooper, the shark expert, and Mayor Larry Vaughn, the head-in-the-sand local politician:

Hooper: What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim. And eat. And make little sharks. That’s all. [Gestures to advertising sign on which a huge shark fin has been drawn] Now why don’t you take a long, close look at this sign. Those proportions are correct….

Mayor Vaughn: Love to prove that wouldn’t you? Get your name into the National Geographic? [Walks away, smiling dismissively]

In 1975 I was 10 years old and was accompanied to the cinema to see Jaws by my late parents. Neither were impressed: my mother watched the whole movie with her hands over her face and my father opined that it “was not as good as King Kong in the 1930s”. Nonetheless, I’d like to think that they’d have been proud of my Hooper Moment.

[Thanks to Mark for capturing a moment on the North East coast, some years ago]

*With apologies for the crappy music and dumb repeat-edits – scroll forward to 2:25.